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REVISED CROSS-IMPACT METHOD AND ITS APPLICATIONS TO THE FORECAST OF URBAN TRANSPORTATION TECHNOLOGY

The urban transportation system of Japan today faces many difficulties such as slow-down of effective vehicle speed, increase in transportation and transit costs, and deterioration of environment by pollutants and exploitation of lands. Both new technological developments and effective policies, among which strong impacts are to be anticipated, are prerequisites for coping with these difficulties. The authors envisage scenarios for the future urban transportation system of Japan by a revised cross-impact method, an attempt to take explicitly into account impacts among separate future technologies. It comprises the estimation of probability of occureence of each technological event, degrees of impacts among events, and revision of occurrence probabilities of events by Monte Carlo simulation, taking the mutual impacts into account.